Nigel Biggar, regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Christ Church college
Oxford students have branded an eminent professor ‘bigoted’ after he suggested feelings of guilt around British colonialism may have gone too far.
Nigel Biggar, regius professor of moral and pastoral theology at Christ Church college, said society should take a more balanced view of the Empire rather than simply remembering it with shame.
He acknowledged ‘atrocities’ had occurred under colonial rule, but said it had also provided law and order in other countries that many citizens had valued.
The comments were made in an opinion piece for a newspaper, titled ‘Don’t feel guilty about our colonial history’.
Yesterday, student campaigners at Oxford called the article ‘racist’ and claimed it ‘whitewashed’ the British Empire.
Common Ground, a student-run race rights group, wrote an open letter condemning the article and claiming it ‘seeks to justify’ colonialism. It also said Professor Biggar should not be allowed to run his new academic project, called Ethics and Empire, which the students said filled them with ‘horror’.
However, Oxford University last night stood by the professor, saying he was ‘entirely suitable’ and an ‘internationally-recognised authority on the ethics of empire’. It said it supported ‘academic freedom of speech’, which must not be allowed to be curtailed in the face of protesters.
Professor Biggar has been at Oxford for a decade and is also a canon of Christ Church Cathedral. He is the director of Oxford’s McDonald Centre for Theology, Ethics and Public Life.
His article, in The Times newspaper, said ‘apologising for empire is now compulsory but shame can stop us tackling the world’s problems’.
![Yesterday, student campaigners at Oxford called the article ‘racist’ and claimed it ‘whitewashed’ the British Empire. Above, Christ Church, Oxford](https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2017/12/15/01/4758ADE200000578-5181631-Yesterday_student_campaigners_at_Oxford_called_the_article_racis-m-7_1513301419545.jpg)
Yesterday, student campaigners at Oxford called the article ‘racist’ and claimed it ‘whitewashed’ the British Empire. Above, Christ Church, Oxford
It pointed out that Britons may become too afraid to intervene in human rights abuses abroad if they saw all past foreign policy as inherently bad.
He said: ‘If on the other hand we recognise that the history of the British Empire was morally mixed, just like that of any nation state, then pride can temper shame.
‘Pride at the Royal Navy’s century-long suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, for example, will not be entirely obscured by shame at the slaughter of innocents at Amritsar in 1919.
‘And while we might well be moved to think with care about how to intervene abroad successfully, we won’t simply abandon the world to its own devices.’
The students said: ‘The inaccuracy displayed by Biggar, as well as a conspicuous lack of rigour, must not go unchallenged. He implies colonised societies had no political order prior to colonisation, invoking a racist, hackneyed, and fictional trope about the nature of pre-colonial societies … [he] seeks to justify a post-colonial agenda of interference that destabilises developing nations.’
They said of Ethics and Empire: ‘We believe Nigel Biggar has shown himself to be an inauspicious and inappropriate leader for this project… Is this what is needed at the University of Oxford – a project led by someone pushing to “moderate our post-imperial guilt”?’
They called on the university to answer what input ‘students of colour’ had in the project and who was funding it.
‘The proud announcement of this project, following on the heels of Biggar’s bigoted article, reflects a university that has shown itself to be singularly incapable of reckoning with its colonial past – and singularly incapable of taking responsibility for how that past continues to shape its present and its future,’ they said.
‘If the University of Oxford, our university, wanted to reckon properly with that past – and its impact on the present and future – it would not stand idly by in the face of Biggar’s commendation of imperialists and apologies for colonialism.’
An Oxford spokesman said: ‘We absolutely support academic freedom of speech. The history of empire is a complex topic and it is important that universities consider our global history from a variety of perspectives.
‘This is a valid, evidence-led academic project and Professor Biggar, who is an internationally-recognised authority on the ethics of empire, is an entirely suitable person to lead it.’
It comes following the failure of a campaign at Oxford to tear down a statue of Cecil Rhodes because of his life as an imperialist. Students at other universities have tried to ‘no-platform’ academics on their campuses because they disliked their views.